Published by Yale University Press, 597 pp. H/B (2009): £28: ISBN 978 0 300 14878: P/B (2010): ISBN 978 0 300 168921
The world that each of us occupies is, at least in part, a creature of our brain. If we want to understand that world, we have to study our brains.
In neurology, just as everywhere else in biology, form is related to function. Our brains are divided into two hemispheres, and the hemispheres are anatomically and functionally highly unsymmetrical. Before neurosurgery it is common to shut down one hemisphere at a time by the injection of an anaesthetic agent into the blood supply to one side. While the effect lasts, the patient is a left or a right hemispherical person. If a wholly unanaesthetized patient is asked to draw a flower, the result will be a fairly accurate, prosaic representation. If the left hemisphere draws it, the drawing will be small, wizened and truncated – a literally reductionist effort. But if the right hemisphere is given the pen, the drawing will be exuberant, sympathetic and free. It won’t just be blandly representational; it will expound: it will have a brave stab at showing the flowerness of the flower. The neuro-romantic in me wants to say that it will look even more like the flower than the flower itself does. It will certainly look much more like the flower than the left hemisphere’s version. If you had to opt for one drawing you would, on any criterion at all, go for the right hemisphere’s. Reductionism isn’t just deadly dull; it’s deadly inaccurate. If you had to sit beside one or other hemisphere at dinner, everyone would unhesitatingly choose the right.
The left hemisphere is conservative, with all the neuroses that typically come with conservatism. It creates rigid models of the world to which it becomes pathologically attached. It hates it when inconvenient, anarchic reality won’t conform to those models. It hates having to revise. It loves lists, statistics, machines and small print. It’s a nerd. And, as you’d expect, it doesn’t always get on well with its counterpart over the other side of the corpus callosum.
The right hemisphere is a holistic visionary. It sees the context in which facts nestle. Its perspective is relational, rather than atomistic. Its perspective is multi-dimensional; that of the left tends to be flat. The left has knowledge; the right tends towards wisdom.
But they need each other. Wise governments need executors in suits. One wouldn’t want the civil servants to rule, though. All sorts of things would go wrong then. But that, says Iain McGilchrist, is precisely what has happened. The Emissary, to use the language of Nietzsche’s story, is assuming an importance that he should not have. The Master is being usurped.
McGilchrist’s book is a dazzling achievement. Drawing his material from many corners of learning, he contends that the history of ideas, and therefore history itself, can be explained in terms of the sometimes creative and sometimes destructive tension between the hemispheres. Neuroscience is crowded with expert, nerdish describers of tiny islands. Until now it has had no one to map the whole, and give each island the often unwanted knowledge of its own relationships. Now there’s a map. Just as a read, it’s an immense pleasure. McGilchrist adroitly avoids the ham-fisted personification of the hemispheres into which pressure of space has forced me. He always knows the limits of his metaphors. Almost every page forced a delighted readjustment of my world view.
And yet I fear for this book. I fear for it precisely because it is so big and ambitious. It is many normal lifetimes of work. The Academy is a narrow, stifling, envious place. It dislikes connections. It is corporately agoraphobic. It gets the vapours if it gets a glimpse of the big picture. It sees the broad canvas as a threat to its raison d’etre, and resolutely refuses to believe that anyone can paint so expertly on such a scale. It is, in short, a left hemispherical place, and it won’t like McGilchrist’s exposé of its shortcomings, and its insistence that it needs to listen to other voices if it is faithfully to represent the world.
McGilchrist concludes with a gloomy diagnosis. The contemporary western world is ruled by the Emissary. The Master is in chains. Effective therapy presupposes accurate diagnosis. The prognosis is not hopeless if we act quickly.
